Do’s and don’ts of Google AdWords remarketing

So, in essence, remarketing allows you to re-engage an online visitor that’s been to your website, left, and now through an ad on another site, they’ve come back to your site to make a booking or take you up on a special offer.

Remarketing can be an affordable way to remind potential guests about your existence and persuade them to book with you, but if you want to do remarketing right and not emphasize that creepy factor of following them around the Internet, use our do’s and don’ts below!

Do:

• Use your brand name – A great benefit of remarketing is increasing exposure and recognition of your brand! Incorporate your logo or brand name into the design of your ad.
• Offer a unique proposition – Many times we’ll see online visitors abandon a booking to see if they can find a better rate or deal so get them back to your website by giving them an incentive or discount.

• Have a clear call to action – Make it easy for online visitors to understand what action they’ll take if they click on your ad. Book now, reserve now, etc. will accomplish this easily.
• Use engaging images and layouts – The ad should match the look and feel of your website so it’s a seamless transition for the online visitor to click your ad and end up back on your website. Test different layouts of your ads as well, maybe vertical ads work better than horizontal banners for your potential guests. If you plan to create the ads within Google AdWords, it’s recommended to select the responsive ad format. That way you don’t have as much work to create the 7 sizes of ads Google offers, they will resize your ad for you. You can also use a designer to develop static ads, but they will need to follow the specified sizes Google provides.
• Institute frequency capping – This feature helps mitigate the creepy factor of following them around to every site they visit. You can set parameters up so the ad only shows a certain number of times to a particular viewer before shutting off.

• Use strong ad copy – Your guest may be in the initial stages of vacation planning and be looking at hundreds of other properties in locations around the country. Your remarketing ad should quickly remind them of your location, property type, and should encourage them to take action quickly on booking with you.  
• Exclude poor content categories – You can choose what kind of websites your ads show up on, so it might be wise to avoid your ads displaying on bad category sites.

• Update your privacy policy – It’s important to let your online visitors know you participate in remarketing and that they have the option to opt out if they so choose. Update your privacy policy page with a simple disclaimer about your participation in Google AdWords remarketing.

Don’t:

• Send visitors back to any old page on your site – You should link to a relevant page or create a landing page for that ad. An online visitor doesn’t want to see an ad showcasing a deal for 30% off and then when they click on the ad they’re taken to your amenities page instead of your online booking engine.
• Set it and forget it – Let the ad run for a day or two and then check in to see how it’s performing. We want to maximize effectiveness and we can only do that by seeing what’s working and improving what isn’t. Don’t just set your ad up and let it run for a month without monitoring its performance.
• Forget to test – If an ad isn’t performing as well as you’d hope, run A/B tests on your ads. Change a color, verbiage, the call to action (remember to only change one thing at a time to correctly identify the element that needed to be improved) to see which ads perform better with your targeted audience.

• Target everyone – You can select how qualified you want the online visitors to be. So perhaps you only want people that have gone into the booking engine, began building a reservation and then left. You know they’re definitely interested but need a little nudge. If someone just visited your homepage, don’t follow them around trying to get them to book when they most likely aren’t that interested in your brand. Use your advertising dollars wisely and retarget the right people.
• Dismiss time zone differences – Another great feature is that you can say when you want your ads to run and when! So if most of your guests come from the West Coast but you’re in the Midwest, schedule your ads to run on their time when they’re online. There’s not much chance of a conversion happening at 1:45 a.m., so shut your ads off overnight and let them run back during the day when people are searching for hotels or inns.

What other tips would you add for a successful remarketing campaign? Tell us below in the comments section!